The U.S. labor market literature relies, for the most part, on government survey data, which is invaluable for identifying economywide trends and differentials but lacks the detail needed about tasks and occupations to detect changes in how work is organized. This project will use two datasets assembled by Burning Glass Technologies containing millions of job postings and millions of resumes. The data offer the scope and scale to make fine distinctions and explore the array of skills embodied in workers and the tasks called out by employers. This project has three aims. First, it will examine variation within occupational categories and connections across categories. Given the growth of within-occupational inequality, understanding within-occupation heterogeneity in skills and other attributes is extremely important. Second, it will use resume data to examine worker mobility. This is a novel approach and is likely to offer important insights about labor market mobility. Third, it will investigate job quality, including nonwage benefits and employment relations, and the incidence of nonstandard work (temporary, on call, and contract based). Nonstandard work is not regularly measured in government surveys, so exploring whether job posting data can offer insight into the prevalence of nonstandard work arrangements and whether such arrangements are associated with job mobility and access to nonwage benefits, as well as differences in wage levels between similar occupations with different employment relations, could lay the groundwork for future research.

This study will seek to explore the consequences of diversity programs on recipients’ individual-level labor market outcomes. Using an audit study, the researcher will examine how Black university diversity scholarship recipients fare when seeking entry-level jobs after graduation in comparison to other Black job applicants. The author then will link these results to a survey of hiring professionals to understand the social and psychological phenomena that may explain the differential treatment of diversity scholarship recipients. The author also will use administrative data from a California postdoctoral program to compare post-Ph.D. outcomes of diversity scholarship recipients to applicants who were closely considered but did not receive the scholarship. The study could add to our understanding of the unintended consequences of diversity initiatives, which may inadvertently stigmatize recipients, and the broader implications of efforts to create more access and more means of support for scholarship recipients of color.

This project will explore the problem of implementing federal tax policy aimed at encouraging work when U.S. labor markets are imperfectly competitive. More specifically, this researcher will study the effect and optimal design of wage subsidies through the Earned Income Tax Credit in monopsonistic labor markets. In estimating the incidence of the EITC on both workers and firms, this research seeks to understand whether the purported inequality-combatting benefits of this federal tax credit are undermined by the capture of a large portion of the subsidy by employers. Because labor market power is known to vary considerably across place, and because exposure to concentrated markets varies by race and gender, this research will help to benchmark the effects of labor market power on places and demographic groups.

This project examines the level of alignment between employer and employee beliefs about the accessibility of paid leave. It takes advantage of a unique data source, The Shift Project, which samples low-wage, service-sector workers from within a set of large retail and food service employers across the United States and allows the team to match employee responses with individual employers. The research will pair quantitative analyses of Shift Project data and in-depth interview data from interviews with twenty human resources staff members at firms in the sample to provide important information about how employer practices may mediate awareness and take-up of paid leave benefits.

This project will examine the effect of both state-provided paid medical leave and city- and state-level sick pay mandates on the provision of paid leave. The proposed project will use restricted-use National Compensation Survey data with geographic identifiers and a difference-in-differences approach to determine whether employers react to the mandated provision of sick leave and state paid leave social insurance programs by reducing their voluntary provision of medical leave, private group disability insurance, and other forms of paid leave such as family leave. No other study has comprehensively studied the interactions and interdependencies of state-level sick pay mandates, employer provisions of paid leave, and state-run medical leave systems.

This project seeks to understand how access to paid family leave influences the provision of eldercare and labor market outcomes among individuals in midlife and whether the effects vary by individual and care recipient characteristics. To examine these issues, the research team will pool data from 11 waves of the Health and Retirement Survey to examine the experiences of respondents aged 51 to 65 with at least one living parent. They will survey responses to determine the intensity of caregiving provided, as well as the intensity of labor force participation, and use a difference-in-differences approach to compare the experiences of individuals residing in states with operational paid leave social insurance programs (California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island) to those who reside elsewhere.